Psyche with an Urn (after Robert Julius Beschlag)

Framing

The frame is a Florentine carved giltwood frame — the style is worth a word, because it is doing more work here than the porcelain plaque it holds.

Florentine frames are carved from solid timber rather than moulded, then gessoed and water-gilded. What defines them is the pierced work: acanthus leaves and C-scrolls cut right through, so the frame is as much air as it is wood, with a carved cresting rising above the top rail and an answering cartouche below. Inside all that movement sits a plain beaded sight edge — a quiet band of repeating beads that steadies the eye before it reaches the picture.

The type descends from the great Italian Baroque and Rococo frames of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and was revived in Florence through the nineteenth century for the Grand Tour trade — visitors who wanted to carry home something with the character of the palazzi they had been walking through. That is almost certainly what this is: a late nineteenth-century Florentine revival frame, of a period with the plaque it holds.

There is a framer's argument for it too. A pierced frame is the correct answer to a very small, very finely painted object. Anything solid at this scale reads as a slab and swallows the picture; a frame that is half open lets the wall through, so the plaque is announced rather than boxed in. It is why a 100 by 150 millimetre painting can hold a wall on its own.